But Is That Because There Aren’t Any Bedbugs Or Simply Because People In Other Boroughs Are Bigger Complainers?

No 311, no honey:

Next week, the city begins a series of seminars at venues all over town on avoiding bedbugs — except in the Bronx.

The reason isn’t that city officials don’t want to come to the Bronx – but rather that, apparently, the bedbugs don’t.

While some residents of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are in a near panic over the worsening citywide infestation, people in the Bronx don’t seem to be bugged by the critters — yet.

“The Bronx had the second-lowest number of complaints last year,” said Seth Donlin of the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which keeps track of such calls to the city’s 311 hotline.

“It’s the lowest total after Staten Island, which is statistically insignificant,” Donlin said.

Bronx residents called to complain about bedbugs just 1,117 times last year, and HPD documented only 347 actual infestations.

Brooklyn saw the most complaints by far, according to HPD, with 2,382 calls and 692 infestations — double the Bronx totals.

Manhattan followed with 1,729 calls, just ahead of Queens, which saw 1,602 complaints.

Infestations by the blood-sucking insects in the city have skyrocketed in recent years.

In fiscal year 2004 the 311 hotline received only 1,800 calls about bedbugs citywide, but by 2007 the number had more than tripled, to nearly 7,000 overall.

Bedbugs were all but eradicated in the United States decades ago. But with the banning of the powerful pesticides used to kill them and increased global travel there has been a resurgence.

Manhattan’s Sue-detenland

The geographic quirkiness of Marble Hill has its advantages:

Vitalina Montesano lives in Manhattan, even though her Marble Hill neighborhood lies on the land mass everyone calls The Bronx.

But when she toppled down the stairs of her housing project in 2005, her lawyer decided to challenge that jurisdictional anomaly by filing her suit against the city Housing Authority in The Bronx — where juries are notoriously more sympathetic to plaintiffs and prone to award big settlements.

The Housing Authority then filed for a change-of-venue motion, saying that the case should be heard in Manhattan with its stingier jury pool.

Her lawyer argued that since Montesano has a 718 area code, a Bronx ZIP code and her children went to public schools in The Bronx, her place of residence is — for all intents and purposes — The Bronx.

“If you send a letter to my client, it goes to Bronx, NY. If you call her, it is a 718 number,” lawyer Ben Robinson told The Post. “It’s a very unique situation.”

Originally, Marble Hill was part of the island of Manhattan — cut off from The Bronx by the Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

But in 1895, the city dredged out marshland to the south of the neighborhood to connect the Harlem River with the Hudson. Later, the creek was filled in, and Marble Hill was made contiguous with The Bronx. When a lower court decided to allow the case to be heard in The Bronx, the Housing Authority appealed. On Tuesday, the state Appellate Division apologetically overturned the decision.

Location Scout: Marble Hill.

The City Finds $2.1 Billion For A Train Stop At That Convention Center But Can’t Figure Out How To Provide Working Elevators At Bronx Family Court*

Sure, the project is a lot less “sexy” but it at least provides some useful purpose:

There are many longstanding, seemingly intractable shortcomings in the city’s family court system that might delay a parent in getting a child back from foster care: unprepared lawyers, overcrowded dockets and long waiting lists for drug treatment and mental health services.

But Bronx Family Court has added a new obstacle: broken elevators.

For about a year, the elevators at the courthouse have been a disaster, people who work there say. Breakdowns have long been routine. This year, repair work has only added to the problem.

Lines to use a working elevator can stretch around the corner. People sometimes wait for hours to get to hearings, which are held on the seventh and eighth floors. Frequently, hearings have to be postponed because clients and witnesses cannot get to them.

“It’s absolutely an outrage,” says Ava Gutfriend, a lawyer who often represents parents in child welfare cases. “But in the Bronx it happens all the time.”

In some cases, warrants have even been issued for people who are downstairs waiting for an elevator; judges know only that they are not in the courtroom, said Bill Nicholas, the assistant attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s office at the court.

. . .

In a city full of aging towers, many people view elevator breakdowns as a common annoyance of life. But the scale of the waiting at Bronx Family Court, which often extends to an hour or more, is beyond what most New Yorkers face. And the potential loss is not simply that of time wasted, but of the quality of justice that is dispensed. Consider the case of a client of Ms. Gutfriend’s who was scheduled for a hearing in mid-November to determine whether she could get her daughter back from foster care, where the child had been for 10 months.

The hearing was set for 10 a.m., Ms. Gutfriend recalled, but it was a day when only two of the four elevators in the building were working. The lines to get on the elevator and up to the hearing rooms stretched back two city blocks. Her client phoned upstairs to let her know she was stuck in the line, but was not able to get upstairs in time.

The judge agreed to call the hearing again an hour later, but the client was still in line. So the judge, who had something like 70 other cases to try that day, rescheduled the no-shows for the next available date. For this mother, the next chance to plead her case and get her child back was in January.

*I don’t care if it’s a reductionist apples-oranges argument — this is horrifying.

What To Do With The Worst Park In The City?

One solution is to trade up:

Once a dumping ground for carcasses of animals sacrificed in Santeria rituals, the community board wants to use hilly 3.3-acre University Woods Park for an affordable condo complex.

But some local activists have been working to clean up and save the park.

Two years ago, Community Board 5 approached developer Andrew Lasala about swapping the park for his property on the waterfront just north of it, which would be ideal for a greenway, said District Manager Xavier Rodriguez.

The state was interested in buying Lasala’s waterfront property, Rodriguez said, and there was interest in swapping it for the University Woods acres, which have been a haven for drug addicts and homeless people and last year was ranked as the worst park in the city by an advocacy group.

Location Scout: University Woods.

“New” Or “Like New” Or Perhaps Just “Reconditioned”

Oh, and by the way, about all that new parkland:

The Bloomberg administration has always claimed more parkland will be created by the new Yankee Stadium project, which swallowed the 102-year-old Macombs Dam Park.

In recent months, the city has upped the numbers, saying 27.6 acres of replacement parkland will be built here, a clear gain of several acres for the community.

Yet 45 percent of these new parks — or 12.5 acres — already exist, either as mapped parkland or, in one case, as a schoolyard. Two of the replacement fields will be more than a mile away.

The replacement plan’s reliance on existing park parcels was acknowledged by Parks Dept. spokesman Warner Johnston, but “just because property is mapped as parkland, or Parks property, does not mean that it is fully developed into a dedicated park,” he said.

“They’re passing off park land the public’s been using for at least 70 years,” said Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates.

. . .

Johnston explained the city’s plan will “transform” similar park property surrounding Yankee Stadium. “The replacement parks will reconstruct the parkland with new amenities and landscaping,” he said. A new artificial turf field at the West Bronx Recreation Center, for example, will go down on what was an “empty lot.”

That lot is 1.2 miles uphill from the former Macombs Dam Park. A mile southeast of the old park, another acre of artificial turf is being installed on the asphalt playground of P.S. 29, built 45 years ago.

“They’re putting in artificial turf — that’s not replacing anything,” Croft said.

Earlier: That Was Fast.